Racism rife in Commons, says MP

Dawn Butler, one of only two black women in the House, speaks out about the discrimination she has suffered from politicians of all parties

Dawn Butler, the MP for Brent South

The House of Commons, held up as a beacon of democracy, has a 'dirty little secret', according to black MPs - its racism.

Dawn Butler, only the third black woman ever to have become an MP, said she faced such frequent racism from politicians of all parties that she had to 'pick her battles' to avoid being constantly in conflict with her colleagues. Disillusioned by what she has found, she is calling for a dedicated complaints department with the power to suspend politicians and send them on awareness training courses.

'I thought people in Parliament would be progressive. It is still a shock that they are not,' she said. 'Over the past 400-plus years, the only black people - and black women in particular - in Parliament have been there to cook and clean. For some politicians, it's still a shock to come face to face with a black women with any real power. Racism and sexism is Parliament's dirty little secret.'

She is backed by Diane Abbott, the only other black woman in the Commons, who said that she had suffered 20 years of prejudice. 'In the beginning, some of it was sheer ignorance. I remember being shocked when a Labour MP asked me once whether we celebrated Christmas in Jamaica,' said Abbott, Labour MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington.

'It has not helped that the Labour party powers-that-be have always seen me as "uppity" but I have dealt with the racism and misogyny by reaching out to other black women.'

Butler, who won the Brent South seat in 2005 when she was 35, described how shocked she was by the attitude of a senior Conservative who challenged her right to have a drink on the Commons' Thameside terrace, a privilege reserved for MPs.

In an article written for the Fawcett Society's new collection of essays, Seeing Double: Race and Gender in Ethnic Minority Women's Lives, Butler describes how former Tory minister David Heathcote-Amory confronted her as she went to sit in the members' section on the terrace. 'He actually said to me: "What are you doing here? This is for members only."

'He then proceeded to ask me: "Are you a member?" And I said: "Yes I am, are you?" And he turned around and said to his colleague: "They're letting anybody in nowadays."

'This man could not equate the image he saw in front of him with that of an MP. It was quite upsetting for my team and so we had to take it further.'

In an interview with The Observer, Butler went on to describe how an official complaint she made was stonewalled. 'It's not as though Parliament has a human resources department that you can complain to and expect disciplinary action from,' Butler said. 'So after being told by the Tory chief whip and the Speaker of the House that there was nothing to be done about it, I had no choice but to let it drop.'

Heathcote-Amory, MP for Wells, rejected the allegation that his remarks to Butler in September 2006 were racist. 'It is quite absurd,' he said. 'What she is actually objecting to is that I didn't recognise her as a new MP. I simply asked her what she was doing at that end of the terrace, and they are quite sensitive about this kind of thing, they think that any kind of reprimand from anyone is racially motivated.' He agreed that there was a problem with too few black and minority ethnic MPs being elected.

'The trouble is that feminism has trumped everything. We are a bit obsessed with getting more women in and I think genuinely broad-based politics is one that takes people from every social and religious group. But we are exaggeratedly courteous to anyone with a different skin colour, so the idea that anything I have said is racist is absurd.'

But Butler has also described further incidents in which she claims to have suffered explicit racism from politicians, lobbyists and police who provide security at the Commons.

'I was using the members' lift in the middle of last year, when a number of politicians started talking about how cleaners and catering staff shouldn't be allowed to use that specific lift,' she recalled. 'It was obvious they were talking about me and so I started to drop hints that I was an MP.

'They didn't pick up on my hints and continued complaining in a loud voice. When we all got out of the lift, I ran along the corridor after the particular person who had been most involved, and tried to make them realise how rude it was to talk like that; it would have been rude even if I had been a cleaner or caterer,' she said.

Zohra Moosa, editor of the Fawcett Society book, said: 'With only two black women MPs and not a single Asian woman, Parliament has never once been representative of Britain. There is no excuse for an unrepresentative democracy in this day and age but, until we change the way our institutions work, we will never have the politicians we need.'

Observer